Saturday, 26 December 2015

Consultation

(teatime of the gods, part 2)

* * *

“Why consult
me?” asked Godlet Gamma, a touch
peevishly, “I did a baddish Job and was taken off the Case. It was handed over
to thee, I’m not allowed to intervene,
I expect that includes consult?” and he reached for the consolation of the Laphroaig
which he happened to have brought with him.

“Aye, right”
said Fate, who believed that two affirmatives made a negative – indeed that two
of anything made its opposite: for instance, two wrongs made a right, two
adults made an infant, etcetera. “Come on, stop that snivelling, grow up and
smell the reality. What’s in that bottle? Lap-phrow-ayg? How do you say it,
what is it, anyway?”

“Er, it’s a Kind of Nectar, La-froig, I think. Wouldst thou like to try it? I like the smoky Flavour, and the After-burn.”

Some time
passed in meditative sipping and noises of appreciation. Then Godlet Gamma
suddenly remembered that he was consulting. Or being consulted. Or something,
something to do with the Terra job, and reality …

“Um? What
reality? … Reality?”

“Ach, forget
that capital stuff, we don’t need it between just the two of us. And forget
that thou/thee stuff as well, who needs it? The old guy, Topgod, has to cover his ass in case of
misunderstanding, but we understand each other fine.”

It took
Gamma some time to grasp this startling idea. “I suppose so,” he finally
replied. “Well, but what is there to consult about? You are Fate. Surely you
decide what happens next, just you? All other inputs are out. Er, so to speak.”

“No, no,
laddie, that’s not the reality, that’s the myth. See, I don’t decide anything.
Stuff happens, and I just record it. Er this frog nectar is great stuff, could
I …?”

“LaFROIG. Yes,
of course, help yourself, plenty more where that came from. But who makes the
decisions, then? It must be someone’s job. I suppose Topgod …”

“No, no,
he’s just the administrator. See, no-one decides. Stuff just happens, like I
said.”

“And that’s
all you do, record it? That’s not really a top job, is it? I mean, you have to
be totally reliable, of course, that’s important, but it’s not cutting-edge, not
like making decisions, like I was doing before he took me off the job.”

“Ah well,
recording is only a bit of what I have to do. The really fascinating bit is,
once I’ve got What happened and Who did it and Where and When, I have to work
out How and Why the stuff happened. That’s a lot harder, verging on the
impossible sometimes.”

“So when you
hear people saying It was Fated …?”

“It’s
rubbish. See, I work out how and why the stuff happened retrospectively, and
then folk can see that Z happened because Y had happened and Y happened because
X had happened, and so on, back to the beginning of time. And because I’ve
shown them this logical trail, they think I must have been in charge of it. And
actually no-one was in charge: the stuff happened just because that’s the way
things work. You could predict the future if you knew enough, but none of us
knows enough.”

“Not even
Topgod?”

“Mm. I’m not
sure about that, but I suspect even Topgod doesn’t know absolutely everything.
I’ve seen him looking surprised.”

“Oh? like
when?”

“For
instance, on Terra, when the human invented the bicycle – it took such a time
after the wheel that he didn’t think it was going to join two wheels and add pedals
… and I think the aeroplane was a bit of a surprise as well, not because of
lack of inventiveness, more because it wasn’t needed, when there was bicycle
and boat, and of course train – he really loved the train ... Och this is a
really really great nectar, has he tasted it? I bet that surprised him.“

(When they
speak about Topgod, they aren’t actually saying “he”, of course: none of them
are he or she or it but something else, like “being” or “entity”, but there isn’t
an appropriate pronoun in any human language, so we rolled the dice to decide
what to use, and it decided on “he”. Was that really a random decision? Does
randomness really exist? You may well ask. But back to Fate and Gamma …)

After a
considerable pause, to savour the after-burn of the great new nectar, Gamma
brought himself back, with an effort, to the matter in hand. Whatever that was.
He felt not quite in precision-think mode.

“He hasn’t
had any yet, I’m keeping it to soften him up about what I’d like to do next, something
I really want to do, but he’ll probably say it can’t be done.”

“Most things
can be done,” said Fate, “so long as it isn’t against a law of nature, you
couldn’t cancel Gravity, for instance. What are you wanting to do? By the way,
I have a rather fine store of biscuits and cheese over in that cupboard, maybe
there’d be something that would go with this frog, would you have a rummage and
see what you can find?”

After a bit
of a rummage Gamma returned bearing a packet of oatcakes and a cheese platter
sporting brie, stilton, manchego, camembert and wensleydale. They tucked in
wordlessly for a while, before Gamma summoned up his nerve and outlined his
near-unthinkable proposal, hesitantly at first.

“What I’d like
to do, it’s maybe impossible, but what I really really want to do, is be a human for a while. For ages I’ve watched them
finding ways to do things that seemed impossible, living in desert or snow-and-ice,
inventing different languages, sailing, flying, climbing to a height where they
can’t breathe; they take huge risks, and they’re so brave, even when they’re
frightened a lot of the time. I’ve watched this and I want to know what it feels
like to do it, to do something that could destroy me, make me not exist, it’s
beyond imagining. I want to know what being mortal feelsh like. Hic! feelslike.”
He hesitated, watching to see if Fate was shocked, but Fate was concentrating
on a rather crumbly oatcake loaded with camembert, so he seized the wensleydale and went on.

“I made mishtakesh,
and now Terra is a messh. If I had really undershtood what it wash like to be a
human, I might of avoided the mishtakes. Hic! And I might be able to put shome
of it right.”

A silence
fell, broken only by the sound of intermittent munch and glug, and presently by
shriek and hiss as word got round the local seagulls that a free lunch was
developing.

Presently a
small, tentative clearing of the throat came through the mix of crumb, laphroaig
and wensleydale. “Er, ish it too shilly to even think about, hic!?”

“No, no-no-no-no. I’m thinking what an admirable and well-meaning young thing
you are. And of course wondering where to get a whole crate of this frog which
is making thinking so painless as to be easy and sharp – very, very sharp and
to the point, ha-hah,” and Fate swayed, ever so slightly.

“Thing ish,”
he went on, “thing is, how to do it. “We can turn you into a human, no big
problem, but you couldn’t shurvive, survive a week, you don’t know how to do
anything, you don’t undershtand money, you couldn’t pick up a fish’n’chipsh and
take it home and watch telly and have a beer and a chat, you couldn’t be
ordinary, not shtraight off, you’d need
practish, practice …”

^Oh. Yesh. I
shee, see the problem. But…” (pause, munch, pause, glug) “… but hic! shposhe,
shuppose I wash born human and learnt
bit by bit, like what a baby doesh? Baby doeshn’t need money for fish’n’chipsh …
“ and with this brilliant suggestion, Godlet Gamma keeled over quite slowly and
lay among the oatcake crumbs and bits of wensleydale, mumbling blurrily de-de-de-DUM, de-de-de-DUM. de-de-de- …

Fate rested
his head on his upper legs for a while. Then with an effort he picked up Godlet
Gamma in his beak, spread his great leathery wings and floated off. Gamma’s de-de-de-DUM grew ever fainter and soon
the shrieks of the seagulls drowned it out entirely.